I know it’s easy to point fingers at teachers and schools when kids don’t measure up, but when students are flunking basic English and writing exams and peppering their answers with emoticons they aren’t to blame—their teachers who let them get away with it are. I know the kids who are the ones who are actually making the errors, but why do they think it’s okay in the first place?
I also don’t buy relaxing grammar rules in the face of new technology either:
Thus, it looks like students are retaining the ability to express themselves in rich terms, but are either incapable of recognizing when to adopt formal usage, or incapable of doing so when necessary. Either of those should be easier to fix than an inability to express ideas through text. Of course, given the historical evolvability of the English language, chances seem good that the teens won’t so much fix the problem as force those with higher expectations to meet them halfway.
link: Student grammar failure: capability or context?
Regardless of everything else, expressing yourself through text (electronic or paper) is more important than ever. Yes, I know I’d understand “cuz” and “alot”, but it’s wrong. In high school I struggled with writing. My term papers weren’t great by any stretch of the imagination. In my case, computers did help because I could write, print, edit, print far, far easier than my non-computer enabled classmates (that would have been most of them in the mid-80s). My writing didn’t improve in college either; I think it actually got worse. Why? Because when I turned in a paper I got my grade and that was it. If it sucked, meh, I have my grade and it’s done. I wasn’t given an option to re-write for a better grade or told “this just doesn’t cut it, do it again.”
I wish I had.
My first semester of grad school, all of us in our first year were in a basic course to bring us up to speed with the latest thinking. It was taught by the department chair and I think there were about 20 of us in the class that term. The first exam, all but one or two of us flunked. We were told in no uncertain terms that our work didn’t cut it at the grad school level. Those of us who flunked were told to read Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and try again.
I did.
I passed.
Not by much though (at the University of Maine getting a C in the grad school was flunking).
Yes, no doubt I was young, brash, stubborn, and far too full of myself to see my own flaws. I wish, though, I that I hadn’t gotten to grad school thinking I could write well. I wish that my teachers had held me to a higher standard.
Now what we’re talking about now, isn’t just a higher standard, but a basic standard. I can only shake my head thinking about what kids are turning in as term papers now. And I hang my head if kids aren’t graded strictly, but fairly, on those papers.
My writing didn’t improve for years. I still don’t think it would win approval from English teachers. I just hope the students who flunk at the college level, get some real help with their writing.
It’s either that or we’re going to have to learn how to write documents in 140 characters bursts.
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